Learn to code, create a startup and f*cking rule this world. Really?

5 min read

I bootstraped Code4Startup.com while I was working full-time from 9am – 5pm, as you all know. It sounds a bit tough and crazy but it has been incredible experience so far. Along the way, I’ve been knowing new friends from around the world who emailed and expressed their willing to support me and my side project. In the early days when I first started, there were so many doubts and uncertain things that I could not get rid of my head.

All the time I asked myself the same questions like: “Is my English good enough for the screencast?”, “Will people like my idea and join my courses?” bla bla. Eventually, I calmed myself: “OK, f*ck that. Just do it!” and later spent week to week to practice and improve my English pronunciation while creating the first two babies: Zero & Ninja.

Think BIG, start SMALL

I dedicated my time and effort with a dream of educating millions of people of how to code and build REAL things. But I actually started small.

It was small with just 2 courses.
It was small with a community of only 53 students (during Beta launch in January).
It was small because all costs I spent to make this happened was just < $100

And today, by the time of this blog (6 Jul 2015), I am teaching over 12,000 students from 100+ countries.
It is NOTHING to compare with Pluralsight, Lynda, CodeCademy or CodeSchool but it means the WORLD to me - a 31 year-old dad, a random full-time employee in Melbourne, a guy do more with less.

The dream has changed

Our generation is no longer dream about career path of studying in top university and being employed in a big company, working day to day in a routine up to retirement at the age of 65. NO!

Today, the dream has changed. Everyone with a cool idea can create something to start their own career and commence to work on their own project. Let’s learn how to code, invest minimum budget, build your dream app and get it live. Don’t worry if you make mistake! Just bring it back, learn your lesson, fix it quickly and keep doing that iteration. With this approach, building a profit business that provides life style, income and meaning that we strive for is no longer out of reach.

During these days, people don’t care where you sit, but what you can bring to them. There is never a good time to create a startup. There are so many dream killers like: I don’t have much time, I don’t have enough money or I don’t even know how to code. But you need to get rid of that and make a move and create something for REAL before you’re ready.

Just do it

While people spending days or even weeks to create a perfect business plan, I just created my first landing page, published it and try to get the first hand on consumer insight to validate my idea as quick and cheap as I can. Once I knew exactly who my audience were and what they expected, I immediately started coding Code4Startup platform in 3 days only (with core functions only: authentication system, comment system, Administration dashboard).

You must be the first one to believe yourself

One of my students, Joe Minock, he used to be founder of a $10K/month revenue startup and now he wants to leverage what he learnt from my Rails course with his previous experience to create a new journey called StartBox.

Rahul Lakhaney, an Indian student who joined Code4Startup in its early days has been employed by a startup in Singapore last week. He got this opportunity right after they saw his prototype (named CodeBrew) which he created after completing the Code4Startup clone. He flew from India to Singapore and now he is working in a Startup. I can imagine how big his smile is now.

So YOU, YOU must be the first person to believe yourself and architect your own destiny. And while that might open you up to failure, it also opens you up to a whole new world.

I'm sharing everything on my journey

from a solo coder to a $1M entrepreneur.

Awesome! So glad to have you here. Stay tuned!

There was an error submitting your subscription. Please try again.

Email Address

Author

Leo Trieu, Founder of Code4Startup

Leo is also a Full Stack developer and instructor in Code4Startup who is passionate about EdTech.